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Scrolls From the Dead Sea
The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Scholarship
Introduction
In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert, entered
a longuntouched cave and found jars filled with ancient scrolls. That initial discovery by the
Bedouins yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a decade and eventually
produced thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves. During those same years, archaeologists
searching for a habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people who deposited the
scrolls, excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of structures located on a barren terrace between
the cliffs where the caves are found and the Dead Sea. Within a fairly short time after their discovery,
historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the
scrolls and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century B.C.E. to 68 C.E. They were indeed ancient!
Coming from the late Second Temple Period, a time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, they are older than
any other surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures by almost one thousand years....